On Wednesday, October 13th, the 3rd annual prestigious Real Estate Forum 2021 conference was held in Brno at the Courtyard by Marriott Brno hotel. Its central themes were real estate challenges related to the Brno city master plan, the market in the post-coronavirus era, and investment trends in the South Moravian Region.
The Real Estate Forum 2021 conference, organized by the Havel & Partners law firm, is a recurring excellent opportunity to meet with experts in multiple real estate market specialties. The opening debate was about the challenges facing the city of Brno, most of which are related to the current master plan. Viktor Poledník, an urban planner working in the Department for Planning and Development, together with Mark Vinter, chairman of the board of the Association of Brno Architects and Builders, agreed that the current zoning plan doesn’t create the right conditions for new projects to be built, and so local property prices are skyrocketing. At the same time, Brno lacks an effective transport and technical infrastructure, both of which are burdened by the growing suburbanization, which is why it’s vitally important to focus on densification and metropolitan development in the coming years.
In the second part of the conference, panelists discussed the impact of the pandemic on the residential, commercial, and industrial segments. The pandemic has acted as an accelerator on the rental and flexible office market. Marcel Soural, chairman of Trigema, spoke about the behavior of investment funds, which are buying up large rental units, thus indicating the direction that the residential market will take in the next several years. Prokop Svoboda, owner of the Svoboda & Williams real estate company, touched upon the current situation in the flexible office segment. Even large companies now want to be flexible when it comes to their employees and clients, whether in terms of the size and layout of the leased workspace, its location, or the services provided. The office has also changed from a place of work to a place for communication, meetings, spontaneous interactions, brainstorming sessions, strengthening corporate culture, and sharing values.
The conference concluded with a panel on investment opportunities in Brno and the South Moravian Region and on the rebuilding of the communities affected by the tornado. One of the participants, Director of the VIA Foundation Zdeněk Mihalco, had much to say about this subject. Other panelists discussed the investment potential of commercial real estate, which, according to Lukáš Netolický of Cushman & Wakefield, is still large since people want to go back to work, albeit in a different setting. Developers of office buildings should now primarily focus on bringing offices closer to public spaces, broadening their outdoor areas, and generally creating places that employees enjoy returning to on a regular basis.
